Subscribers of voice and/or data services provided by service providers utilize subscriber end stations such as mobile electronic devices to connect to the service provider's wireless or wireline network. The communication between the subscriber end station and the service provider's network occurs through one or more base stations using one or more standards or protocols, such as those defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). One current 3GPP standard for mobile subscriber end stations is Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is a wireless standard for high-speed data communication. The voice and/or data services provided by such networks are typically tracked using online charging functions to monitor the amount of various types of traffic used by each subscriber end station. Such charging functions have been presented in standards put forth by the 3GPP.
In these communication networks, a gateway, which provides the subscriber with a connection to a particular network resource, may utilize subscriber information (e.g., policy configuration information, traffic policing information, etc.) provided by an external server such as an Online Charging Server. This charging information may include information used for monitoring the subscriber's traffic consumption for policy enforcement purposes (e.g., throttle peer-to-peer traffic, throttle streaming media traffic, etc.) and/or for accounting and charging the subscriber (e.g., charging based upon the content of traffic, enforcing a quota for a type of content based upon credit assigned to the subscriber, etc.).
When a gateway is to enforce a quota for a particular traffic flow, it receives a quota amount from the external server. This quota amount represents a total amount of data that may be sent to and received from a subscriber. However, some gateways may utilize a forwarding plane containing dedicated network processing units. For example, a gateway may contain one network processing unit that only processes uplink traffic and one network processing unit that only processes downlink traffic. In such gateways, it is difficult to appropriately split the received quota amount into two portions and minimize the need to signal the external server for additional quota amounts.